675,000 Ukrainians pour into Russia as ‘humanitarian crisis’ looms

Pro-Russian protesters wave a Russian flag and hold a sign (C) reading "Our brothers are in Russia, we are slaves in Europe" during a rally in front of the regional administration building in the industrial Ukrainian city of Donetsk on March 1, 2014. (AFP Photo)

An estimated 675,000 Ukrainians left for Russia in January and February, fearing the “revolutionary chaos” brewing in Ukraine, Russia's Federal Border Guard Service said. Officials fear a growing humanitarian crisis.

On Sunday, the border guard service said Russian authorities have
identified definite signs that a “humanitarian
catastrophe” is brewing in Ukraine.

“In just the past two months (January-February) of this
year…675,000 Ukrainian citizens have entered Russian
territory,” Itar-Tass news agency cited the service as
saying.

"If 'revolutionary chaos' in Ukraine continues, hundreds of
thousands of refugees will flow into bordering Russian
regions," the statement read.

Ukrainians have long formed a large presence in Russia. According
to the official 2010 census, 1.9 million Ukrainians were
officially living in Russia, although the head of the Federal
Migration Service put that figure as high as 3.5 million one year
before. While those migrants were often prompted by economic
concerns, political turmoil has spiked the recent rise in
Ukrainians attempting to leave the country.

On Saturday, Russian migration authorities reported that 143,000
requests for asylum had been sent to Russia within a two-week
period. Russian officials have promised to expedite the
processing of those requests.

“Tragic events in Ukraine have caused a sharp spike in
requests coming from this country seeking asylum in Russia,”
said the chief of the FMS’s citizenship desk, Valentina Kazakova.
“We monitor figures daily and they are far from comforting.
Over the last two weeks of February, some 143,000 people
applied.”

Kazakova said most requests come from the areas bordering Russia,
and especially from Ukraine’s south.

“People are lost, scared and depressed,” she said.
“There are many requests from law enforcement services, state
officials as they are wary of possible lynching on behalf of
radicalized armed groups.”

A week after the government of Viktor Yanukovich was toppled by
violent street protests, fears of deepening political and social
strife have been particularly acute in Ukraine’s pro-Russian east
and south.

Soon after Yanukovich opted to flee the country in what he
branded as an extremist coup, a newly reconfigured parliament
did away with a 2012 law on minority
languages which permitted the use of two official languages in
regions where the size of an ethnic minority exceeds 10 percent.

Apart from the Russian-majority regions affected by this law,
Hungarian, Moldovan and Romanian also lost their status as
official languages in several towns in Western Ukraine.

Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said Ukrainian deputies
were wrong to cancel the law, while European parliamentarians
urged the new government to respect the rights of minorities in
Ukraine, including the right to use Russian and other minority
languages.

Konstantin Dolgov, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s commissioner
for human rights, was far more damning in his criticism.

“The attack on the Russian language in Ukraine is a brutal
violation of ethnic minority rights,” he tweeted.

Out of some 45 million people living in Ukraine, according to the
2013 census, some 7.6 million are ethnic Russians. Leaders of
several predominately Russian-speaking regions have said they
will take contr